Telephone ordering by calling vendors on “800” or other toll-free numbers at call centers is commonly used for impulse purchasing of branded products and services advertised on TV or in print publications and other media. However, such advertising must generally be pre-recorded for TV or printed and distributed far in advance of the time when the item is available to be offered for purchase. Therefore, the existing call center paradigm cannot conveniently transact with purchasers for items that require up-to-the-moment information on availability and/or are offered at substantial discounts in order to take up inventory at the last hour which would otherwise go unsold. An example of the types of items that may be offered at substantial discounts days or hours before closing are visitor, recreational or sports activities in which a prescribed capacity of seats need to be sold before departure or game time.
Also, when a customer calls a call center, the call center agent typically does not know any details about the caller or what specific item the caller is interested in. The agent therefore needs to step the customer through a long series of input queries in order to fill out a complete transaction record, including the caller's name, address, affiliation, item interested in, item description, order parameters for the item, charge card information, and confirmation details. In order to avoid long waiting times for callers, vendors at call centers must operate multi-line phone banks with large agent staffing requirements to handle surges of customer call-ins during offering periods. Due to the high costs of such multi-line, multi-agent call centers, vendors often need to outsource call center operations to foreign countries.
In order to provide short-notice advertising of purchasable items offered at last minute discounts, recent ordering systems have attempted to push text or email advertising to mobile phones and communication devices and have the user respond by calling a toll-free call-center number. U.S. Pat. No. 6,889,054 to Himmel discloses a mobile push advertising system in which a user pre-registers with a base station for a mobile service area a profile of preferred items for which they want to receive mobile ads and a preferred schedule for receiving ads. When the mobile phone is detected in the base station area, ads are pushed to the mobile phone. The user has an option to establish contact with a call center pre-registered with the advertising system for fulfilling a purchase. The user's profile data may be sent to the advertiser call center to facilitate a purchase.
Another prior example described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,421,396 to Niwa is a travel information system that allows the user to register a cell phone number and a detailed pre-travel itinerary with a travel agency and receive information about local conditions purchase and offers specific to each destination area on their itinerary.
U.S. Patent Publication 2007/0073562 to Brice et al. discloses a travel information system that allows the user to pre-register a detailed itinerary with a travel agency and receive information on a wireless computer or phone specific to local events and conditions in each destination area. The traveler can also handle pre-travel bookings when preparing the itinerary with the travel agency.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,353,398 and 6,741,188 and Patent Publication 2008/0091537 to Miller and Amin disclose a mobile push advertising system for sending location specific information (including sale offers) to a user when their mobile phone is detected by GPS as being in a specific area.
U.S. Patent Publication 2008/0169937 to Lowry discloses a system wherein a destination vendor can be notified of the impending arrival of a user of a pre-registered cell phone at a specific location, so that the vendor can send offers to the mobile phone user just in time for their arrival.
U.S. Patent Publication 2008/0095354 to O'Connor discloses a mobile phone system in which a user can call a call service center and send ad or location information read from an RFID chip to determine to which agent at the call service center the call should be routed.
However, the prior art has not provided a solution by which a user of a mobile phone can receive an advertising message for immediate availability of an item and can conveniently complete a transaction with a call center agent in which the user's information and the item's information are already known at the time of the call. Such a solution would avoid long waiting times for callers, and allow call centers to operate more efficiently with reduced agent staffing requirements.